By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, August 02, 2019
The emotional volume of this Will
Wilkinson column in the New York Times is excessive, but there is
much that is useful in it.
Try to get past the McCarthyite language and the
illiterate neologisms. (“Denialism”? What’s wrong with “denial”?
This is a little like how “epicenters” have come to displace good
old-fashioned “centers,” even though “epicenter” does not mean “center.”)
Wilkinson writes:
The molten core of right-wing
nationalism is the furious denial of America’s unalterably multiracial,
multicultural national character. This denialism is the crux of the new
nationalism’s disloyal contempt for the United States of America.
Perhaps those Americans who hold political views at odds
with Wilkinson’s are not “disloyal” but simply hold political views at odds
with Wilkinson’s.
Wilkinson argues that our gregarious new “nationalists”
do not seem to care very much for the United States of America as it actually
is, and about that he has a point. Many of the people vowing to “Make America
Great Again” have nothing but contempt for the most successful communities and
enterprises in these United States: Silicon Valley, the universities, Wall
Street, Hollywood, the major cities — all merit criticism, and trenchant
criticism, but conservatives sometimes forget why it is these institutions
command our attention in the first place. Wilkinson is right that there is a
great deal of talk about the “Real America” that is fantastical and delusional.
But I wonder if Wilkinson is not in some sense arguing
himself in circles, or at cross-purposes with himself. These nationalists, he
says, do not much like the actual country, the country as it is. But they, for
their part, would argue that that is precisely what they cherish, and that they
resist political efforts by the likes of Wilkinson et al. to transform the
country into something other than what it is. I do not think they reject the
pluralism and diversity of the country categorically: Perhaps it is the case
that they are happy for Miami to be Miami and for New Orleans to be New Orleans
and (pushing it here, I know) for Los Angeles to be Los Angeles, but do not
wish for the entire country to be like one of those places. I have often said
that about Las Vegas: I am happy that it is there, but I do not want it everywhere.
The nationalists would turn the charge back against Wilkinson et al.: Why not
let the United States be as it is? Why not let Kansas be Kansas? It is not as
though progressives give a fig about “diversity” or “pluralism” when either
runs up against their political projects. You’re going to pay for those
abortions in Chicago, Bubba. You’re going to write that birth-control policy,
Sister Marie-Claire.
Wilkinson says these so-called nationalists believe
themselves to be “entitled first to a country that feels like home to
them.” In this he is no doubt correct. Is that necessarily wicked?
Would we think it wrong if the sentiment were being expressed by, say, a farmer
in Andhra Pradesh lamenting the changes wrought by globalization on local
agriculture, or a restaurateur
in Paris rolling her eyes at the opening of yet another KFC, or a poet in
Kyoto lamenting the ubiquity of American popular culture, rather than a Trump
voter in Oklahoma complaining about whatever it is that Trump voters in
Oklahoma complain about?
To be sure, that sentiment is wrong when it requires the
maintenance of injustice — African Americans’ claim to civil rights superseded
southerners’ claims to their local traditions, and the claims of gays couples
to arrange their lives and dispose of their property as they see fit supersedes
the claims of people who’d rather just not think about that. But I do not think
the “follow my pronoun conventions or lose your job” strain of “social justice”
to which many reactionaries react is entirely about justice. Still less
is it about honoring diversity and plurality. It is about homogeneity,
conformism, obedience, and the pleasure of exercising social power over one’s
perceived cultural rivals. It is not the Right that seeks to gut, for example,
federal statutes for the protection of religious liberties or to limit the
scope of political speech.
I have been thinking about this in relation to the recent
increase in the volume of claims about “racism” in American politics. (Look for
that essay in the future.) I think conservatives can admit this much: It is the
case that American institutions and the facts of African-American life have
been shaped by centuries of policies and attitudes that ranged from the merely
oppressive to the monstrous, and those who charge that the conservative bias
toward the status quo effectively entrenches and furthers that racism are not
entirely wrong. (Conservatives once had a bias toward the status quo; since the
1990s, they have been drifting away from that toward a stance of right-wing
revolutionism.) But people of good will, including conservatives, have
generally been willing to work toward reform where justice demands it. Consider
the career of Barry Goldwater, who is mainly remembered for his opposition to
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but who also was an important leader in the cause
of civil rights, leading both public-sector and private civil-rights efforts in
Arizona and helping to fund an important desegregation lawsuit in Phoenix out
of his own pocket. Different people end up making different conclusions about
tradeoffs, and that does not make them evil. And there is an enormous
difference between “We should reform certain police procedures” or “We should
address these educational inequalities” and “Smash
capitalism!” or proclaiming that the future of the United States “is the
path that I call democratic socialism,” as Senator Sanders says.
The role of race in all this tends to be oversimplified.
It almost certainly is the case that racial differences can amplify political
differences, and that Barack Obama’s being black made him seem even more
radical or even “un-American” to a lot of people who would go on to embrace
Trump, but it also is the case that the overwhelming majority of those
self-proclaimed nationalists would have been very, very happy to vote for a
charismatic black man who shared their views.
That being said . . .
In a society that maintains some decent respect for the
individual conscience and private property, there will be some disagreement
about how to balance claims of justice with the most basic claim of political
liberty: the right to be left alone. And many — though by no means all — of
these funny new “nationalists” are really arguing for very little more than the
right to be left alone. Many conservatives, including religious conservatives
such as myself, believe that as a matter of law and politics same-sex couples
have every right to arrange their own affairs however seems best to them. Would
that the Left would extend the same indulgence to home-schoolers.
The problem with American political discourse right at the
moment is that we cannot have that discussion without Democrats insisting that
those who would draw the line of activism short of their desired point are
Nazis and Republicans arguing that those who would draw the line one micron to
the left of where they’d like are getting ready to grow out Stalin mustaches
and build gulags. This is preposterous, but we are nonetheless very, very
worked up over it.
There is a proverb (attributed variously) about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “If the Arabs put down their weapons today there
would be no more war. If the Israelis
put down their weapons today there would be no more Israel.” These so-called
nationalists believe something similar about themselves. Wilkinson is correct
that many conservatives see the Left as the aggressor in the culture wars. They
are not obviously wrong to do so, and it is a mistake — or a cynical
strategy — to conflate the genuine pursuit of justice with ordinary politics.
There is another line of argument that might be
interesting for Wilkinson et al. to pursue. There are conservatives who
complain that progressive-leaning communities and institutions — the media,
Silicon Valley, Wall Street and much of Big Business more generally, the
universities, the commanding heights of culture, etc.— have at their command an
overwhelming arsenal of cultural firepower, and that conservative-leaning
institutions and communities have very little of that in comparison. This is
true. But have they — we — really seriously asked ourselves why? Worth thinking
about, for those inclined to do that sort of thing.
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